Saturday, April 2, 2016

CPD Mini-Course in Public Diplomacy

In an age of information abundance, merely sharing information is neither sufficient, nor is it effective, to inform and influence PD stakeholders. To capture audience attention and get buy-in, it is imperative to craft and tell compelling stories.

For those working in the public diplomacy and NGO sectors, telling your organization’s story is crucial to developing relationships, finding funding, and creating a support base. A strong social media, mobile, and digital presence across platforms can help get this story heard.

This course will introduce various narrative techniques and storytelling tools to improve public diplomacy practices and impact. Experts from a cross-section of disciplines, including journalism, entertainment, data visualization, and strategic marketing, will share their insights.

This three day CPD Mini-Course on Public Diplomacy will teach you the foundations, tools, techniques, to more effectively tell the story of the work you are doing to the public using a variety of platforms and tools.

The workshop is comprised of five modules:

Narrating Public Diplomacy

Engaging Your Audience Through Multimedia Storytelling

Creating Social Stories

Story Design in Entertainment

Strategic Narrative in Branding Nations

Tuition: $2,250 per person inclusive of course materials and some meals. Organizations wishing to send more than one participant can obtain a discounted tuition of $1,850.

To apply, please complete the application form found here. Application deadline is May 2, 2016.

For over ten years, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy has been the go-to program for diplomats, non-state actors, international organizations, scholars, and business executives to engage in public diplomacy training. Our unique learning model of dialogue, presentations, simulations, and small group discussions provide participants the tools and skills needed for the practice of public diplomacy.

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JB comments on the above:

LATEST PD NEWS!Nineteenth-century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy has allowed himself to be resurrected from the dead to "engage" in die oh-so-slick three-day highly "professional" USC PD "Storytelling" Course, as he realizes that "War and Peace" should be a best-seller in ISIS lands. !!!
One minor condition for his participation: He will only accept dollars, not rubles, for his engagement in This Important Pedagogic Event (TIPE)

Image from, with caption: Tolstoy in May, 1908, four months before his 80th birthday Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw opens with a plea for someone to tell another ghost story round the fire -- one whose own multiple tellings are part of its "dreadful -- dreadfulness": "'The story will tell, I took it upon myself to reply .... 'The story won't tell' said Douglas; 'not in any literal, vulgar way.' 'Won't you tell, Douglas?' someone else inquired."--Alicia Rix, The Times Literary Supplement (March 25, 2016), p. 22A mini-course, except not so-mini given the cost ($2,250 for three days of "instruction")?See also: "Hey, buddy, can you spare $81,634 for an MA degree in public diplomacy?" [hear song on video, "money (that's what I want)."]

For over ten years, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy has been the go-to program for diplomats, non-state actors, international organizations, scholars, and business executives to engage in public diplomacy training. Our unique learning model of dialogue, presentations, simulations, and small group discussions provide [sic - JB ] participants the tools and skills needed for the practice of public diplomacy.

Despite their power, stories can fall short in achieving their intended objectives (i.e. sharing knowledge so as to improve the performance or change the behavior of others in the organization.) Stories may be inadequate or inappropriate for reasons of form and/or delivery. Some “story traps” include the following:Seductiveness:Stories can be so compelling, so seductive and vivid – either as a
result of their rich detail or their eloquent presentation – that the listeners can get
absorbed into the “truth” of the story and can have difficulty critically evaluating it as a template for their own experiences. When this happens, the listeners can be distracted from the real purpose of the telling, which is to prompt them to seek
analogies and applications in their own work and domains of influence.Single point of view: One of the limitations of stories is that they are told from the perspective of one individual. This single point of view may be less directly relevant to the activities and concerns of many other individuals, and thus loses its power to connect with them. Story researchers have worked on techniques of designing stories that deliberately incorporate multiple perspectives (Cohen and Tyson, 2002). For example, a Roth and Kleiner “learning history” weaves together direct quotations from multiple organizational players in its analysis of an historic organizational situation, which is intended to speak meaningfully to the broad organization (Roth and Kleiner, 1995; Kleiner and Roth, 1997). The popularity of Tamara – a play in which dozens of characters simultaneously unfold their stories not on a single stage but in real time as small groups of audience members follow characters from room to room, floor to floor – attempts to break the single perspectiveness of storytelling (Boje, 1995).Static-ness:The impact of a story is likely to vary depending on its delivery – who is the teller and whether it is shared in an oral or written form. Ruggles (2002) notes that when stories are written down, they suffer many of the same problems that all explicit representations of knowledge face: disconnection from the teller, fixed linearity in the telling, and a certain degree of “petrification” that is required of any snapshot. Such stories are also captured at a given point in time with an audience of that time in mind. In a changing environment, such stories might eventually become distanced from the realities and concerns of the current specific audience. To avoid this shortfall, written versions probably need to be regularly revisited and updated or rephrased to reconnect them with the language and issues of the present. In this regard, Ruggles observes that Harvard Business School has a long tradition of teaching complicated topics using stories, in the form of cases. Many of these cases are used year after year, with appropriate modifications in their discussion and interpretation, but with their core lessons remaining constant (Ruggles, 2002).

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About Me

A Princeton PhD, was a US diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. For the Open World Leadership Center, he speaks with
its delegates from Europe/Eurasia on the topic, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" (http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2017/03/notes-and-references-for-discussion-e.html). Affiliated with Georgetown University (http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jhb7/) for over ten years, he still shares ideas with students about public diplomacy.
The papers of his deceased father -- poet and diplomat John L. Brown -- are stored at Georgetown University Special Collections at the Lauinger Library. They are manuscript materials valuable to scholars interested in post-WWII U.S.-European cultural relations.
This blog is dedicated to him, Dr. John L. Brown, a remarkable linguist/humanist who wrote in the Foreign Service Journal (1964) -- years before "soft power" was ever coined -- that "The CAO [Cultural Affairs Officer] soon comes to realize that his job is really a form of love-making and that making love is never really successful unless both partners are participating."